Kew Gardens bosses pledge to root out plant thieves

From planned heists to cheeky tourists, botanists claim plant poachers are costing them thousands

KEW GARDENS loses priceless plants to thieves every year, scientists at the facility have said as they called for poachers to be handed fines that match the value of the theft.

Researchers at Kew work with law enforcement to find international plant crime gangs, which steal specimens worth millions of pounds from gardens and nature reserves.

Poachers have targeted the west London gardens, Dr Carly Cowell, its plant crime expert, revealed in a podcast, which is being released by scientists at Kew to raise awareness of their work. In each episode, an expert at the facility will be interviewed by James Wong, a botanist, about their efforts to conserve plant species around the world.

Dr Cowell told The Daily Telegraph: “We have one to two incidents a year. In one incident, you could have one plant taken or many, so we can end up losing a fair amount of important plants. These are just the ones who are caught.”

While some of the thieves are hardened criminals who carry out heists similar to those in art galleries, others are ordinary members of the public who fancy taking a flower home.

These plants can be worth tens of thousands of pounds – and are priceless to the scientists at Kew.

Dr Cowell explained: “It’s generally just the public who feel that they want to take a snippet of something or nick something quickly that they can’t find to buy. They think Kew has so many plants that we won’t notice. They don’t realise the importance of these plants, which is why we need to raise awareness that plants have values.”

One of the worst examples was in 2014, when a poacher snuck into a greenhouse to take a Nymphaea thermarum, the smallest water lily on

Earth. Extinct in the wild, a small number of the plants were grown from seed by the scientists.

Fines for plant thieves are insignificant compared to the “street value” of the specimens taken. Kew Gardens scientists want this to change. A spokesman said: “We believe that fines should be equivalent to the value of the plants stolen, plus the restoration of the habitat or compensation to communities who have lost these plants. We also believe that sentences should be on par with animal-based crimes [which are higher].”

Unwitting gardeners could all too easily become plant traffickers, the scientists warned. “Unless you’re a botanist, if you are a plant enthusiast it is very easy to commit plant crime unwittingly. It’s ubiquitous. Two pages in on an ebay search will find you some plants listed on Cites [the list of protected species],” Mr Wong warned.

Orchids and cacti are the two household plants most likely to be smuggled by poachers, Dr Cowell added.

She said: “We need to raise awareness so that when people are buying plants online that they’re asking the right questions, making sure the right paperwork is there. People need to be careful when they are looking at orchids and cacti online, they need to be very aware that all those species are listed on Cites. If nothing is listed it does raise flags and they would need Cites permits, and they could unwittingly become a trafficker.”

Kew scientists recently uncovered a poacher who managed to steal 2,000 succulents from protected areas in South Africa. Dr Cowell said: “We tracked him down to his guesthouse, and in his bathroom we found over 2,000 succulent plant species… He was not a botanist or a conservationist, he was a poacher. It was gut wrenching.”

Unearthed: Mysteries From an Unseen World launches on itunes and Spotify on Wednesday